Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and Its Remakes

There are not many movies about Heaven, but of those that exist, one often senses a feeling of diffidence on the part of those who produced them.  The reason for this, I suspect, is twofold.  First, it is difficult to present Heaven in a way that makes it as appealing as the Eternal Abode is supposed to be.  Second, religion is a sensitive subject, and they don’t want to offend anyone.  To this end, those that produce such movies may attempt to disarm their audiences in a variety of ways.

One such way is to present the story as a dream or hallucination.  For example, in The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945), Heaven is merely dreamt by a trumpeter, and in Stairway to Heaven (1946), there is the suggestion that the story we see is the hallucination of a British pilot.  A second way of disarming the audience is through an exculpatory prologue, a disclaimer to the effect that the movie is not being presented as something factual, as if that were not obvious, but as merely a figment.  This device was also used in Stairway to Heaven.  Finally, the movies tend to be comedies, so silly that no one is likely to take them seriously.  Here Comes Mr. Jordan utilizes the last two of these techniques.  It is indeed a comedy, and it starts with a prologue, beginning with “We heard a story…,” where the “we” has no antecedent, but presumably refers to those who made this movie, asserting that the story is a yarn that someone told them, and they thought it was so interesting that they just had to turn it into a movie.

The main character of this movie is Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery), a heavyweight prize fighter who plays the saxophone as a hobby.  I have never played a wind instrument, but somehow I just don’t think being smashed in the mouth on a regular basis would be good for one’s embouchure.    But maybe that explains why he plays it so badly.  Anyway, his manager is Max Corkle (James Gleason), the one who the prologue says told this story.  Max tells Joe not to fly his plane to New York, because it is too dangerous, but Joe pooh-poohs his concerns and decides to fly his plane anyway.  I don’t suppose I have to tell you that the plane crashes.

Joe finds himself among the souls of the departed, souls that are walking on clouds and are boarding a plane that will take them to their final destination, presumably either Heaven or Hell, depending on the situation.  This is another dodge.  Let’s give Joe the benefit of the doubt and assume that his final destination is Heaven.  As noted above, it is difficult to present Heaven as someplace you might want to be.  So, rather than have us see the place and be disappointed, we only get to see the plane that will take him there.

One would think that no technology at all would be necessary in the world of the spirit, but somehow the technology so envisioned in Heaven is often that presently available on Earth.  That is why, in the Book of Revelation, it is said that Jesus will use a sword to smite nations.  We might give that a pass, but it is downright ludicrous when Satan uses cannons to fight the good angels in Paradise Lost.  Anyway, the airplane was still a pretty impressive piece of technology in 1941, when this movie was made, so that may explain why there are airplanes in this movie, both the one in which Joe dies and the one that transports people to Heaven or Hell.  It was a technological improvement over the mode of afterworld transportation used in Liliom (1930), which was a train.  On the other hand, the train was good enough for The Good Place (2016-2020).

But only a handful of people seem to be boarding that plane.  Now, based on the population of the Earth in 1941, I estimate that about fifty thousand people died every day at that time, so one would have expected teeming masses instead.  And about this time you are probably thinking that I am taking this movie way too seriously.  But I did this to illustrate my earlier point, that these movies are given a frivolous tone so that either people like me will not bother to analyze them, or that others will dismiss us as being pedantic if we do.  Besides, the way I figure it, any movie that got the Academy Award for Best Story and also for Best Adapted Screenplay entitles me to criticize it for not making much sense.  However, I will try not to nitpick.  I will not, for example, ask if spending eternity checking off names before people get on a plane is as dreary for Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains) as I would imagine it to be.  Instead, let us consider some of the more serious absurdities.

Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of this movie is Joe’s mentality.  That Joe is incredulous when he is told by Messenger 7013 (Edward Everett Horton) that he has died is understandable.  But when he is finally convinced of this, his reaction is incredible.  I mean, I don’t know about you, but I would be awed by my encounter with Eternity.  “So this stuff about God and the immortal soul is true after all,” I would be saying to myself in amazement.  As an atheist, I suppose it is only to be expected that I would be stunned, but I dare say that even the most devout would be almost in disbelief to find out that their hopes for an afterlife had actually been realized.

Joe does not care about any of this, however.  His only concern is that he was supposed to fight for the title of Heavyweight Champion of the World.  And now that he is dead, his chance at the title bout is over.  Or is it?  No, it seems that Messenger 7013 messed up and removed Joe’s soul from his body before he crashed, thereby not allowing Joe to pull the plane out of its dive.  In fact, Mr. Jordan discovers that Joe was not supposed to die for another fifty years.  Joe is delighted to find that he will be returned to Earth.  Does this attitude not slight Heaven, assuming that is Joe’s destination?  It is as if Joe said, “Thank God I won’t have to go to Heaven for another fifty years!”  But that is a common attitude in movies about Heaven, to wit, that notwithstanding the fact that being in Heaven is supposed to be the most perfect form of existence a soul can aspire to, life on Earth is always thought to be preferable, much more preferable.

Because Joe’s body was cremated, a substitute will have to be found.  Joe wants a body that will allow him to become Heavyweight Champion of the World, but they need one that is fresh.  And of those that have recently died or are about to, a Mr. Farnsworth seems to be a good choice.  Mr. Farnsworth is a wealthy man who is in the process of being held under the water in his bathtub by his wife and his male secretary.  Joe doesn’t much care for the Farnsworth body, however, until he gets an eyeful of Bette Logan (Evelyn Keyes), the daughter of a man who unfairly ended up going to prison on account of Farnsworth’s illegal financial activity.

Joe is torn.  What is more important to him, getting to be Heavyweight Champion of the World, or marrying this woman he has fallen in love with?  Having just discovered the secret of Eternity, all Joe cares about is love and fame.  Now, you might say that Heaven can wait.  After all, Joe will get there eventually, so he might as well have some fun first.  Or will he?  If I had just found out that there really is a God, I would, as I have already said, be stunned.  But once I recovered from the shock and found out that I was going to have to go back to Earth, my question to Mr. Jordan, asked with much fear and trembling, would be whether there was a Hell, and if so, what I would need to do to stay out of it.  Nothing could be more important than that, certainly not boxing fame or the love of a woman.  Therefore, I would certainly want to know what the rules are for staying out of Hell.  Do I need to turn the other cheek?  That might be something of a disadvantage in the boxing ring.  Am I already in trouble for looking at Bette with lust in my heart?

But as I said, Joe’s simplistic mentality does not think about such things.  Instead, he decides he can have both love and fame by being Farnsworth, saving Bette’s father from prison, courting her, and at the same time, building up his body to get in shape to enter the ring.  But when he becomes Farnsworth, he still looks like Joe.  To Joe and to us, that is, not to everyone else.  This is so Robert Montgomery can continue acting the part.  I think it would have been more interesting to see a different actor take over at this point, allowing us to see how Joe’s soul operates within Farnsworth’s body, but the plot must conform to the needs of the actor who is the star of this movie.

In order to get back in shape, Joe gets in touch with Max.  At first, Max does not believe him, but the saxophone convinces him.  In other words, the function of the saxophone in this movie is to act as an attribute.  Since Joe keeps changing bodies, the only way Max can identify him is through this musical instrument.  I guess the saxophone’s soul survived the plane crash too.

Unfortunately for Joe, there is another thing he can’t seem to get through his punchy head, which is that there is no such thing as free will, for all has been ordained by God in advance.  Actually, that is not quite right.  One of the interesting things about a lot of Heaven movies is the way they never talk about God.  Mr. Jordan and the Messenger keep using the passive voice, saying that this or that was “meant to be” rather than saying, “God meant things to be that way.”  This is another dodge used by those who produce movies about Heaven.  It is so God cannot be blamed.  Or rather, it is so that the producers of this movie cannot be blamed for making God responsible for evil.

Joseph Breen, who was in charge of enforcing the Production Code, in addition to expressing his concerns about the use of religious concepts for humorous effect, cautioned that “certain religious groups will resent any expressed opinion on the controversial topic of predestination,” as cited by Gerald Gardner in The Censorship Papers:  Movie Censorship Letters from the Hays Office 1934 to 1968.   It seems pretty clear to me that with all this talk about how things were meant to be, the movie comes down on the side of predestination.  Kent Turner of film-forward.com says it is “one of the few rom-coms expressly for Presbyterians.”  But I guess the use of the passive voice was enough to satisfy Breen with the final product.

The particular evil in question for which God must not be blamed is the murder of Farnsworth.  The first attempt at murder by his wife and secretary failed, but on the second attempt, they succeed.  It is not clear whether Mr. Jordan deliberately misled Joe into thinking he could be Farnsworth for fifty years, or whether Mr. Jordan subsequently found out that Farnsworth would soon be murdered.  Mr. Jordan is always going around with a superior, smug look on his face, as if he knows everything, so one suspects he was being cute about letting Joe think he could be Farnsworth long enough to win the title and marry Bette.

Just before Farnsworth is to be murdered, Joe is told that remaining in Farnsworth’s body was not meant to be, as if there were some impersonal destiny that ruled the world.  But suppose instead that Mr. Jordan told Joe that he would not be able to continue using Farnsworth’s body because God wants Farnsworth to be murdered. The audience would be appalled.  And yet, that is the implication.  However, what is implied by a movie and what is explicitly stated are two different things.  Therefore, the issue is completely skirted by not referring to God at all.

Fortunately for Joe, a prize fighter named Murdock, whom Joe was supposed to fight, gets shot dead by gangsters right there in the ring during the title bout because he refused to throw the fight.  That way the other guy will win the fight, and the gangsters will get to collect on their bets.  Those gangsters!  They are so clever.  But it’s a break for Joe.  He gets to enter Murdock’s body, come alive at the count of nine, get up and win the fight.  But Joe figures there’s no glory in occupying Murdock’s body for a few seconds, just long enough to win a fight, so he wants another body that he can really call his own.

Mr. Jordan, however, washes away all memory of his being Joe or Farnsworth.  He now occupies Murdock’s body as if he really were Murdock.  The only one left with any memory of all this is Max, who tells the police where the body of Farnsworth can be found, much in the way that you or I might reveal where the body of a murdered man had been hidden without fear that the police might suspect that we had something to do with it.

The whole idea of finding another body for Joe was that he would otherwise be cheated out of another fifty years of life.  But it is Murdock’s body with Murdock’s brain he supposedly gets, and it has none of Joe’s memories.  As Leibniz once said, if you tell me that when I die, I will be reborn into another body, but will have no memory of my present life, then you might as well tell me that when I die, someone else will be born.  In short, Joe has still been cheated out of the rest of his life, while it is Murdock who gets revived, wins the title bout, and gets the girl.  Murdock and Bette have this feeling of having known each other before, but I don’t think Leibniz would have been impressed.  I know I’m not.

This movie was remade as Heaven Can Wait in 1978, using the same title as that of the play by Harry Seagall on which the original movie was based. Most of the differences are trivial.  Joe (Warren Beatty) is a professional football player who wasn’t supposed to die in an accident, and what this Joe cares about is getting a body that will allow him to play in the Super Bowl.  As we might expect, the plane has been updated to that of a Concorde.  Messenger 7013 has become The Escort (Buck Henry), who must hate his job, because he is a sourpuss.  Betty Logan (Julie Christie), whose name has undergone a different spelling, is not worried about her father, but about the environment.  And so it goes.

Even though the Production Code ended ten years before this version was made, those that produced this movie must have still had some misgivings about taking a stand one way or the other on the matter of predestination.  On the one hand, as with the original version, predestination is clearly implied.  When Mr. Jordan (James Mason) inquires as to when Joe was supposed to arrive in this afterworld, he is told that he was supposed to arrive at 10:17 AM, March 20th, 2025.  There are two things worth noting about this:  First, it is precise, down to the minute.  Second, it is what is supposed to happen.  Now, that sounds like predestination, sure enough.

Unlike in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, where the word “God” is never uttered, in Heaven Can Wait, there are several occasions in which someone uses this word, usually as part of an exclamation, but in any event, only by people on Earth.  Neither Mr. Jordan nor The Escort ever says the word “God.”  When The Escort informs Joe that he will not be able to use Farnsworth’s body to play in the Super Bowl after all, he avails himself of the passive voice, saying, “It wasn’t meant to be.”  And Mr. Jordan does likewise.  He says to Joe, “You must abide by what is written….  There’s a reason for everything.  There’s always a plan.”  What he most decidedly does not say is, “You must abide by God’s plan, because he has a reason for everything.  That’s why he wrote it down.”

With or without explicit references to God, all this is in keeping with the doctrine of predestination.  But early in the movie, when Mr. Jordan asks The Escort what happened, The Escort confesses that he removed Joe’s soul just before the crash because he was afraid it would hurt.  Mr. Jordan reprimands him, saying, “Every question of life and death is a probability until the outcome.”  Well, that’s true for us mortals, who must consider what is likely or unlikely on a daily basis, but it makes Mr. Jordan sound like an actuary who works for a life insurance company.  In any event, this notion of the probability of an outcome does not square with the precise time and date given above.  Nor does it square with the notion that this was when Joe was supposed to die, with what was written, with the plan.  My guess is that those who made this movie were as uncomfortable with taking a firm stand on predestination as Joseph Breen was, and they were trying to weasel their way out of it with a contradiction.  When it comes to religion, that often seems to work.

The movie was remade again as Down to Earth in 2001, using the same title as the 1947 sequel to Here Comes Mr. Jordan.  Regarding the sequel, I was lucky.  It is not available on Netflix, so I have been spared the fate of having to watch it.  As for the remake that goes by this title, in this version, Chris Rock stars as the Joe character, but going by the name “Lance Barton.”  Lance is a professional comedian, and his problem is that he is not funny, and he always gets booed off the stage.  However, his best chance for success will be if, just before the Apollo Theater closes for good, he can win a slot in the Amateur Night Contest = become Heavy Weight Champion = win the Super Bowl.

Lance’s day job, so to speak, is that of a bicycle messenger, and when he sees Sontee Jenkins (Regina King) = Bette/Betty Logan walking across the street, he gets distracted and is hit by a truck and killed.  In this case, Keyes (Eugene Levy) = Messenger 7013 = The Escort, makes the mistake of plucking Lance’s soul from his body ahead of time, even though he is required to use a stopwatch to make sure souls are taken at the exact moment they are supposed to be.  When we first see Keyes, he says he hates his job, which was something we always suspected about his avatars in the first two versions.  It would have been blasphemous for Messenger 7013 to have said such a thing in 1941, and even in 1978, it would not have been acceptable for The Escort to say as much, though he is so miserable that we can hardly think anything else; but religion in the twenty-first century is no longer sacred, and the audience can hear Keyes make such a remark without thinking God would be offended.

There is no plane in this movie to take Lance to his final destination.  Instead, Heaven is like the hottest nightclub in town, and he finds himself standing in line with other people waiting to get past the velvet rope.  A good looking girl says that Mike put her on the list, and she gets to go right in.  But when some dork tries to gain entry, he is told to go to Hell.  Lance is admitted, and what he finds inside is an adolescent’s idea of Heaven, one never-ending party.  Mr. King (Chazz Palminteri) = Mr. Jordan runs the joint, and as he explains to Lance, “The food is great, the women are beautiful, and the music, Lance, the music is hot.  The fun never stops.”

I should have said this is Heaven as envisioned by a male adolescent, and a straight one at that, for this is certainly no gay bar.  Presumably, women exist in this Heaven to provide pleasure for the men, sort of like the seventy-two virgins for male martyrs in the Paradise of Islam.  That’s why this nightclub Heaven is always pleased to welcome women who die young, while they are still desirable.  I am trying to imagine a gender reversal, where a Josephine dies before her time, and is told by a Ms. Queen that the men in the night club are rich and powerful, and the marriage proposals never stop.  But I may be way off base.  I have known young males to indulge in such fantasies as presented in this movie, but no woman of any age has ever told me of her fantasies of Heaven.

In any event, regarding this nightclub Heaven as presented in this movie, most straight men would enjoy that sort of thing once in a while, but the prospect of being trapped in that nightclub doing the same thing over and over again for eternity is dreadful.  The only way it could possibly be enjoyable is if it involves some kind of eternal recurrence:  there you are in a fancy nightclub, feeling good from a couple of drinks, and dancing with a beautiful woman, who gives every indication she’ll be going home with you at the end of the evening; and then, after about fifteen minutes, your memory is washed away, and you start at the beginning again, on the dance floor with that same woman, oblivious to the fact that you have done this countless times in the past, and will do so countless times in the future.  Ugh!

Mr. King comes across as a wise guy, an Italian with mob connections.  When he realizes that Lance was taken before his time, which is precise to the minute, he says he talked to his boss and can fix things.  Lance asks, “You talked to God,” and Mr. King says, “Yeah.”  So, this is the first version in which someone in the afterworld acknowledges that there is a God, let alone indicates that God has agency, that he has chosen to allow Lance to be granted a new body rather than just have him stay in that nightclub.

One of the refreshing things about this version is that Lance quickly catches on to the mechanics of occupying the body of Mr. Wellington (Brian Rhodes) = Mr. Farnsworth.  In the previous versions, it was exasperating the way it took Joe so long to understand the rules.  One of the rules is that Lance continues to look like Lance to himself after he enters Mr. Wellington’s body, but not to others.  Occasionally we see him through the eyes of others, in which case he looks like Mr. Wellington, an older white man, who is mostly bald with just a little gray hair left.  So, when Lance is at the Apollo coming on like Chris Rock, telling black jokes to a black audience, as far as the audience is concerned, some white guy is making fun of them.  And when others see him with Sontee, that’s amusing too.  They are not only a mixed-race couple, as well as a May-December couple, but they also seem to be unsuited to each other as to their looks, for he is somewhat unattractive, while she is pretty.  But then, he’s a billionaire, and such men can usually have their pick.  In any event, when Lance moves into the final body of Joe Guy (Arnold Pinnock), another black comedian, he and Sontee make a more suitable couple.

Even though Mr. King admitted that he talked to God to get his approval for obtaining a new body for Lance, he resorts to the same old artifice when it comes time for Lance to give up Mr. Wellington’s body.  When Lance objects because he has just asked Sontee to marry him, and she said yes, Mr. King says, “You’ve got to play by the rules.”  When Lance keeps resisting, Mr. King says, “No one makes these rules, kid….  It’s fate.”  Unlike genuine predestination, in which God ordained everything that happens from the beginning of time, fate is an impersonal kind of necessity, which characterizes the rules, according to Mr. King.  Since God didn’t make the rules, he cannot be blamed for the rule that says that Wellington must be murdered.  So, whereas God is allowed to be an active participant in what happens when it is something good, like that of getting Lance a new body, he is nowhere to be found when something evil takes place, such as the murder of Mr. Wellington.

And so, as with the first two versions of this story, predestination seems to prevail in this movie, though cast in an impersonal form.  But I wonder if anyone cares anymore, the way Joseph Breen once feared they might.  In a review on christiananswers.net, the author noted the profanity, sex, and references to drugs in the movie, but said nothing about the issue of free will versus predestination.  Nor did any of the posted comments express concerns on this matter.  I searched for other Christian websites that might have a review, but I found none.

In any event, the most remarkable thing about this movie is that, unlike the reaction I had when watching its predecessors, I think this version is occasionally funny.  But, boy, am I in the minority!  I have already referred to the Academy Awards for Best Story and Best Screenplay for Here Comes Mr. Jordan, and Elaine May got the nomination for Best Screenplay for Heaven Can Wait, but for the most part, the critics did not seem to care for Down to Earth.  Roger Ebert gave it one star, saying that it is “an astonishingly bad movie.”  I never laughed once while watching Here Comes Mr. Jordan, and I found Heaven Can Wait to be irritating.  But when I watched Down to Earth, at least it did make me laugh once in a while.  It’s not so good that I expect to ever watch it again, but as a one-timer, it’s not bad.

For the sake of completeness, I suppose I should at least note that there are four other remakes of Here Comes Mr. Jordan.  First, there is Ice Angel (2000).  This is the movie that Roger Ebert might well have deemed an astonishingly bad movie.  It is unworthy of discussion.  I understand that there are a couple of versions made in India:  The Skies Have Bowed (1968) and Mar Gaye Oye Loke (2018).  From what little I know of the religions India, I don’t think that predestination would be as contentious an issue in that part of the world as it is for Christianity.  But my biggest regret is that I have been unable to see Debbie Does Dallas… Again (2007).  I looked for it on Netflix, but no luck there.  I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.

Children of Men (2006)

Although the movie Children of Men was released in 2006, and the novel on which it is based was published in 1992, it seems well-suited to tap into the anxieties of today:  the resurgence of fascism; the influx of immigrants having dark skin, especially those who are Muslims; and the declining birth rate of Caucasians, especially Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic Christians.  However, these three elements are disguised, for it would be unseemly to make them explicit.

The movie is set in the year 2027.   The United Kingdom is one of the few places left that has a functioning government.  Refugees pour in, fleeing war and starvation, even though it looks like the kind of country that under normal circumstances you would want to get out of.  The government has become a police state, while terrorist groups, like the one known as “The Fishes,” wreak havoc throughout the city.  And why, you ask, is the world in chaos?  It’s all because women stopped having babies 18 years earlier.

Come again?  Why would infertility cause a breakdown in society?  I could imagine people walking around, looking a little despondent at the thought that mankind would be extinct in less than a century, but why that would cause a dystopian world is a mystery.  The movie just plops that explanation before us as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.  If anything, worldwide infertility would ease population pressures.  We already know that people who are single have a much easier time making a living than people who have children, so there is no reason to think there would be so much starvation.  It would be like the Malthusian principle in reverse.  Granted, things may get a little difficult in about 40 years, when everyone will be a senior citizen, but that would not explain the present situation.

The explanation for this incoherence was noted above.  It would not do to say that it was the white race that was suffering from infertility, while darker skinned refugees were breeding with abandon, which is what a lot of people really fear.  And so this is concealed by having it be the entire human race that has become infertile.  While this disguises the appeal to white angst, it does so at the expense of not making much sense, for the reasons given above.

Anyway, in the midst of all this, a woman named Kee turns up pregnant.  It is important that she is played by a black actress, Clare-Hope Ashitey.  Had a white actress played her part, the subliminal racist threat of a declining white population might have become too obvious to ignore.  In any event, she becomes a pawn in the struggle between the state and the terrorists.  As a result, there is all this running about trying to get possession of the baby, while Theo (Clive Owen) tries to get Kee to this place in the Azores where a group known as the Human Project has scientists who are trying to find a cure for this pandemic of infertility.  Before he can get her onto a ship named Tomorrow, she has the baby.  She had joked earlier that she was a virgin, but that was more than a joke.  We are supposed to regard her pregnancy as having religious significance.  We know this because when she gives birth, and at other times when there is a lot of emphasis on the baby, we hear heavenly background music.

I know that for some people, life is precious, but given the world this movie presents to us, it is hard to regard Kee’s pregnancy as a good thing.  Why would anyone want to perpetuate such misery?  A midwife named Miriam, who was taking care of Kee for a while, says that everything happens for a reason.  Well, looking at the misery and suffering that mankind has been reduced to, perhaps she is right.  The reason for the infertility is to put an end to the evil known as Homo sapiens.

Unfortunately, Kee makes it onto the ship that will take her to the Human Project, and as the credits roll, we hear the laughter of children in the background, suggesting that the cure for infertility will be found, thanks in part to women like Kee.  Of course, we have to ask ourselves, “Won’t these children grow up to be just like all those adults we have been watching kill each other for almost two hours?”  This little baby will grow up to be a terrorist; that little baby will grow up and become a member of the police force; and that other little baby over there will end up in a concentration camp.  Now, aren’t we glad the Human Project is going to succeed?

However, if this movie is an unconscious fear of the decreasing fertility of the white race, then we can interpret the Human Project as actually being the White Project, the idea being that if we can just get white people to start having more babies so as to outnumber those of darker skins, then Western civilization can be saved.

Damn Yankees (1958)

Damn Yankees (1958) is a musical about a man who sells his soul to the Devil for the sake of baseball.  It is the dumbest version of the Faust legend I have ever seen.

This is not to be confused with the fact that the story about Faust does not make sense to begin with.  According to the legend, Faust sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for worldly goods, such as knowledge or pleasure, and then, after twenty years or so, he will be forever damned.  Who in his right mind would make such a deal?  Evil may be fascinating, but stupidity never is, and we quickly lose interest in the fate of anyone stupid enough to do that. To put it differently, anyone who sold his soul to the Devil would for that reason have to be mentally impaired, and thus would deserve to be forgiven.  Of course, the Faust of legend is supposed to a great scholar, so that rules out the stupidity excuse.

If the Devil manifested himself one day in my living room, promising me whatever I wanted, pleasure, power, wealth, fame, or knowledge, if only I would sell him my soul, which would then mean suffering eternal damnation once I died, there is no way I would agree to such an offer.  What I would do, however, is spend the rest of the day saying to myself, “Wow!  All that stuff about God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, is true.”  And then I would completely change my life. From then on, I would turn the other cheek, give all my worldly goods to the poor, and never again look at a woman with lust in my heart. Thanks for the heads up, Satan!

I think that would be a perfectly rational choice on my part, for what could be more important in this world or the next than avoiding the fires of Hell?  But is this the reaction that Faust or the later Faustian characters have when they encounter the Devil? No, never, not once do they react that way.  Instead, with only a hint of hesitation, they condemn themselves to eternal torment for a mess of pottage.  In Goethe’s Faust, the title character sells his soul and gets to have sex.  In The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), a struggling farmer gives it up for seven years of prosperity.  And so it goes.  Why such stories have captured the imagination of people for centuries is beyond me.

A couple of movies have managed to transcend the inherent absurdity of the Faustian premise.  Bedazzled (1967) is religious satire, and it is hilarious.  When a movie makes us laugh, all sins are forgiven.  And Angel Heart (1987) is believable because the Faustian character in that story figured he had a way of cheating the Devil.

But as I said, Damn Yankees is the worst of the lot.  I tried to suspend disbelief, accepting for the sake of the movie that there is such a thing as the Devil and Hell, and I even tried to make allowances for Faustian imprudence on the grand scale. But even so, the thing just didn’t make sense.  It all begins in the living room of Joe Boyd, who is yelling at the television because his favorite baseball team, the Washington Senators, is losing.  In his exasperation, he says he would sell his soul if the Senators had a slugger who could put the ball over the fence, beating the Yankees.  Suddenly, the Devil appears, going by the name Mr. Applegate (Ray Walston), ready to make a deal.  He says that in exchange for Joe’s soul, he will make Joe the greatest baseball player ever, who will help the Senators win the pennant.  He will make him Joe Hardy (Tab Hunter), and he will be twenty-two years old.  Joe has misgivings, thinking for a moment about his job and his wife Meg, but Applegate says this is too big a deal to worry about them.

In the end, Joe deserts Meg.  From the song she was singing earlier, lamenting how during baseball season, which is six months of the year, she is neglected, we gather that she and Joe are now in their forties.  She appears to be a housewife, a common role for women in the 1950s.  And so, after Joe leaves her, she continues in her role as a housewife without the slightest concern that there is no longer any income with which to pay the bills.  In other words, it is not just the supernatural part of this movie that makes no sense.

In making the deal, Joe insisted on an escape clause.  If he changes his mind before the last game of the season, by midnight of September 24, the deal is off. So, we figure that is how he will get out of the deal.  He will play baseball until then, and then back out at the last minute.  But that is not what happens.  To keep Joe from invoking the escape clause so he can go back to Meg, whom he misses, Applegate has a lost soul named Lola try to seduce him.  This results in complications and a few songs, but the end result is that Joe does not back out at the last minute.  He stays with the Senators.  And so, we figure Joe will continue helping the Senators win the pennant and then be dragged down to Hell.

And then, from out of left field, Applegate decides he is going to make the Senators lose the pennant.  But that would mean he would not be living up to his end of the bargain. So, we now figure that when, against all reason, Applegate makes the Senators lose the pennant, Joe will not have to go to Hell, because Applegate failed to fulfill the contract. No, that’s not it either, because in his effort to make the Senators lose the pennant, Applegate turns Joe Hardy back to Joe Boyd, thinking he will not catch the fly ball.  But Joe does catch the fly ball, and so the Senators do win the pennant.  So, that means Joe is going to Hell after all, right?

No, Joe goes back home.  For some reason, Meg takes him back, as if being abandoned didn’t bother her in the slightest. Applegate shows up, we think to collect Joe’s soul, but instead he acts as though Joe is in the clear.  He offers Joe the chance to help the Senators win the World Series in exchange for his soul.  I suppose if Joe had made that deal, then at the last minute, Applegate would have tried to make the Senators lose the World Series, but when he failed and the Senators won the Series anyway, Joe would go back home then too, and once again be in the clear, for reasons that don’t make sense, either in this world or the next.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) return to the small western town of Shinbone for the funeral of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne).  A local reporter and the owner and editor of the local newspaper want to know why an important politician like Senator Stoddard would come to the funeral of someone they had never even heard of.  Stoddard decides to tell them who Doniphon was.

Most of the story the reporters already know.  Stoddard came out West with nothing but his law books, and he was immediately made aware that the law counts for nothing in the territory when his stage is held up and he is beaten with a silver-handled whip by a vicious bandit named Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin).  He would have beaten Stoddard to death had Reese (Lee Van Cleef) not stopped him.  Later in the movie, Valance does the same thing to a newspaper man, Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brian), and again Reese has to stop him before he kills him.  Now, when a bandit played by Lee Van Cleef is the one who has to restrain the leader of a gang from being excessively brutal, you know that gang leader must really be evil.

The town marshal, Link Appleyard (Andy Devine), is afraid Valance, so he is worthless.  Doniphon is a match for Valance, but he basically just minds his own business.  All he cares about is Hallie, whom he hopes to marry.  The tension between Valance and Stoddard finally reaches the breaking point, and Stoddard picks up a gun he barely knows how to shoot and decides to meet Valance out on the street.  Things look pretty one-sided, but amazingly enough, Stoddard shoots Valance and kills him.  As a result, he becomes known as the man who shot Liberty Valance, propelling him into his political career.  He ends up marrying Hallie to boot.  Doniphon angrily goes home and burns up the house he was building for him and Hallie.

But then Stoddard tells the reporters something they did not know.  It turns out that it was Doniphon who killed Valance with a rifle from the other side of the street.  In fact, we see that when Stoddard fired his pistol, he shot way too high.  The thing that made Stoddard famous, then, is basically a fraud.  (We even have to wonder if Hallie would have married Stoddard had she known the truth.)  The owner of the newspaper wads up his notes and throws them in the furnace.  “When the legend becomes fact,” he says, “print the legend.”

This ending is reminiscent of Fort Apache (1948).  However, in this earlier film, we get the sense the people, especially children, need heroes, and so that is why the legend is made to prevail over the truth.  In this movie, however, we get the sense that the legend simply makes better copy.  But if that were true, we would not care for the movie.  That is, if Stoddard had been the one who killed Liberty Valance, the movie would have been just one more Western in which good triumphs over evil, and the hero gets the girl.  But just as this movie is far more interesting for having a twist ending, so too would the readers of the newspaper have found the truth to be more fascinating than the story they had previously been led to believe.  The local paper would have become nationally known as the one that broke the story about what really happened.

In many cases, the legend is more interesting than the facts.  Anyone who has ever read a paragraph or two about the real King Arthur knows that.  It is the story of the Round Table, of Excalibur, Lancelot, Guinevere, and the Holy Grail that matters to us.  Not so in this movie, however.  Here, the truth is more interesting than the legend.  That’s why it’s a good movie.

The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945)

The Horn Blows at Midnight is a dream movie.  Athanael (Jack Benny) plays third trumpet in a band. Just before the beginning of a live broadcast, he falls asleep during a commercial for Paradise Coffee, a decaffeinated brew that lets you sleep.  He starts dreaming and does not wake up until the last few minutes of the movie, when he falls off his chair.  Elizabeth (Alexis Smith), who plays a harp, asks him what is wrong with him.  He says, “Elizabeth, I just had the craziest dream. You know, if you ever saw it in the movies, you’d never believe it.”

Well, the audience for this movie didn’t believe it, of course, because they knew all along it was a dream.  But the more important consideration was whether they liked it.  In general, audiences do not like dream movies, presumably because it means that what they are watching is not really happening.  This is something of a paradox, because that is true of most movies, even those without dreams in them. After all, Hollywood has sometimes been referred to as the “dream factory.” Nevertheless, the audience can get into a movie they know to be fiction and experience it as something real, but when they know the movie is someone’s dream, they tend to lose interest.

Brief dreams are not a problem, of course, and they may even enhance our enjoyment of the movie, as in The Manchurian Candidate (1962).  It is the longer dreams that test the audience’s patience. That is why most dream movies do not let the audience know until the end that what they are watching is a dream, as in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Woman in the Window (1944).  Even so, we feel somewhat cheated at the end.  Laura (1944) was originally intended to be a dream movie, and director Otto Preminger even filmed an ending making it explicit, but he wisely left it out of the movie.  In The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), we are never really certain whether the ghost is real or dreamt, and this allows us to tentatively accept what we are watching as real.  But in The Horn Blows at Midnight, the dream begins early in the movie, which we know to be such right from the start, and it goes on until just before the end.

A link between reality and the dream comes in some remarks Athanael makes in the beginning.  He tells the first and second trumpet players, who correctly blamed him for playing the wrong notes during practice, that they will be punished someday for snitching on him.  When Elizabeth tries to console him for having to be just the third trumpeter, saying that at least he is making money and eating, he replies, “I’m an artist. I wish I’d never heard of food or money.”  He continues:  “It’s an ungrateful world, Elizabeth.  If I had my way, things would be different.  There’d be a lot of changes made.”

And that brings us to the second weakness of this film:  it is a Heaven movie. Even apart from the movies, Heaven is a problem all by itself.  No conception of Heaven ever really sounds all that appealing. Because it is hard to take Heaven seriously, movies about Heaven tend to be comedies. This provides them with a certain amount of immunity from criticism.  But that cuts both ways, allowing them to be subversive without seeming to be so, and that is the case with this movie.

Typically, as little time as possible is spent in Heaven itself, as in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) or A Guy Named Joe (1943), allowing the events on Earth to reflect the influence of Heaven.  In fact, in the movie Heaven Can Wait (1943), we never even get to Heaven.  The protagonist spends most of his time in Hell recounting his sins. Because this is a comedy, we are not supposed to take Hell any more seriously than Heaven.  In general, Heaven movies suffer from the same problem as dream movies, which is that audiences know that what they are watching isn’t real. So, when the movie is a dream about Heaven, as in the case of The Horn Blows at Midnight, it is a movie about something that does not really happen, about a place that does not really exist.  Stairway to Heaven (1947), which holds the record for the most time spent in Heaven, is a movie that may also be a dream, but we are never sure one way or the other. That uncertainty allows us to regard what we are watching as possibly real.  In The Horn Blows at Midnight, on the other hand, there is no uncertainty in this matter at all.

Anyway, Athanael dreams that he is an angel who plays a trumpet in the heavenly orchestra.  The dream is a wish-fulfilling fantasy, in which the “ungrateful world” he referred to earlier is selected for destruction, owing to its unworthy inhabitants, and he is to destroy it himself by blowing the first four notes of the Judgment Day Overture on his horn exactly at midnight. So, he is sent to Earth, in accordance with the general principle that it is better to move the story out of Heaven as quickly as possible.  As an angel, he knows nothing about food or money, as per his wish while he was still awake.  He doesn’t seem to know anything about sex either.

The first and second trumpet players in real life are fallen angels in the dream. They try to keep Athanael from blowing his horn.  Oddly enough, we are expected to pull for Athanael, even though he wants to destroy the world, while pulling against the two fallen angels, who are trying to save it, though for selfish reasons, of course.  If a man commits a murder, he is evil.  If he goes on a rampage and kills a dozen or so, he is a mass-murderer.  And if he is like Hitler or Stalin, who were responsible for the deaths of millions, he is a monster.  Athanael is trying to kill every last person on this planet, but since his orders come from Heaven, that makes it all right.

As another religious incongruity, five minutes before midnight, when Athanael is supposed to blow his horn, he meets a woman on the roof of the hotel.  She is crying because the cad she was in love with no longer wants to have anything to do with her.  Athanael assures her that everything will soon be all right, that her troubles will all be over with once she is dead.  But she misunderstands what he is saying and decides to commit suicide by jumping off the roof.  Athanael stops her, telling her that suicide is a mortal sin.  So, it’s all right for God to kill her and everyone else on this planet, but if she beats him to the punch and kills herself just a few minutes earlier, she must spend eternity in Hell.

It is to be noted, however, that the orders to destroy the world do not explicitly come from God, as if to hold him innocent.  This is typical.  We almost never see God in a Heaven movie.  The only exception is in The Green Pastures (1936), and that is because we are to understand that movie, not as portraying God and Heaven as they really are, but as conceived of by African Americans, understood to be a childlike race at the time that movie was made. And we do hear the disembodied voice of God in the blasphemous satire Bedazzled (1967).  Other than that, it is always some administrator that gives orders and makes decisions, so that whatever evil ensues, God can be held blameless.  In this movie, the orders come from the Deputy Chief of Operations.  So, does he get his orders from God?  No, that would be too close for comfort.  He gets his orders from the Front Office. We never see the Front Office.

Apparently, there are thousands of planets with people on them, but Earth is an inferior planet, a six-day job, practically slapped together.  The inhabitants have been warned about their evil ways through various natural disasters—”quakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, droughts, plagues, everything”—but to no avail.  So, they must be all be killed.  Normally, Heaven has a demolition expert for such things, but he is busy destroying one of the larger planets.  So, as one of the trumpet players in the heavenly orchestra, the one least likely to be missed, Athanael has been selected for the task.

The Deputy Chief points to pictures of two angels, Doremus and Osidro, corresponding to the first and second trumpeters in real life.  He says they were sent to Earth on a mission some time back, but instead of performing the task they were assigned, they were unable to resist temptation and decided to stay on Earth.  Indirectly, this is an admission that Heaven is so boring that the two angels have chosen the pleasures of Earth over the so-called rewards of Heaven, even though it will mean they must go to Hell eventually.  When Doremus and Osidro realize that Athanael has arrived to bring about Judgment Day, they try to tempt him by taking him to a swinging party, assuring him that all that talk about Hell is just propaganda, otherwise there would be nobody left up there in Heaven.

Of course, neither the Deputy Chief nor Athanael dares to utter the word “Hell,” but refers to it only as the “other place.”  Doremus and Osidro likewise avoid that word.  This is typical in Heaven movies.  Everyone knows that the vast majority of mankind will burn in Hell for eternity, but it is not proper to speak of such things in a Heaven movie except in hushed tones, with euphemisms and circumlocutions, so as not to embarrass God.

I suppose Athanael is redeemed by the fact that in his wish-fulfilling dream, he falls to his death before he can blow his trumpet and end the world.  Perhaps he unconsciously realized that killing everyone on this planet would be wrong, even if that is what God wanted.

Whispering Smith (1948)

When Whispering Smith opens, we see a man riding his horse out of the mountains.  We hear some lazy music playing as the credits tell us that Alan Ladd is starring in this movie.  If you didn’t know better, you might think that winter has passed and Shane has decided to ride back into the valley to visit Joe and Marian Starrett and their son Joey.  Of course, this is absurd, because Shane would not be made for another five years.

In this movie, Ladd plays Luke Smith, also known as “Whispering” Smith, because, as it is later explained to us, he is so soft spoken, even when he has the drop on some railroad robbers.  This often happens, because Smith works for the railroad in the capacity of a private detective, Western style, of course.  But it would seem strange to call a man “Whispering,” however, as in, “How have you been, Whispering?”  So he is also called “Smitty.”

The lazy music comes to an end and is replaced something a little more grim as two men with rifles take aim at Smith.  They shoot, and the horse rears up and falls over landing squarely on top of the stuntman, who was presumably scraped away so that Alan Ladd could take his place, who, as Whispering Smith, doesn’t seem hurt at all.  He sees three men ride away, who we later find out are the Barton brothers, who Smith has been sent to bring to justice for robbing a train and killing a guard.  His horse needs to euthanized, Western style, of course, and Smith ends up having to walk the rest of the way.

The scene shifts to a train, where we meet wrecking boss Murray Sinclair (Robert Preston), hail-fellow-well-met.  It is his job to clear wrecks off the tracks, and he has just returned from performing that chore, nothing but a “rockslide and a broken arm,” as he puts it.  As far as he is concerned, the bigger the wreck, the better.  He deplores the way modern equipment and more frequent inspections will soon make his job obsolete.  We figure he just means that he likes the challenge, but later we find out that he has been profiting personally from these wrecks, claiming goods have been irreparably damaged and taking possession of them, when in fact they are still in good condition.

A conductor reaches out the window of the moving train and grabs a telegram (don’t ask me how).  It is from the president of the railroad, and it says that Luke Smith has been assigned to take care of the Barton brothers.  Murray waxes nostalgic about the old days, when he and Smitty (that’s what he calls him) first took jobs with the company, even rooming together until Murray married Marian.  Marian?  This is another Shane coincidence.  And just as Shane and Marian Starrett fell in love, though she was married to Joe, so too do we find out that Smith and Marian in this movie were in love too, but he never thought he was good enough for her, and she married Murray, figuring that Luke (that’s what she calls him) didn’t want her.  Later in the movie, Murray begins to catch on to the fact that there is something between the two of them, which strains the friendship.

Anyway, Smith manages to come aboard the train, which is then held up by the Barton brothers, two of whom Smith manages to kill.  He is also shot, but the harmonica in his pocket deflected the bullet, so he is not fatally wounded.  Murray brings him home with him, and Marian nurses him back to health.

Through conversation, we find out that Murray has a big ranch, and he offers Smitty a partnership to run it, but he is not interested, probably because he does not want to be around the woman he loves while she is married to his best friend.  Murray says he has to head into town to turn in his report on the train wreck, which is three days late, to “Shiny Pants,” George McCloud (John Eldredge), the new division superintendent.  Murray derisively refers to him as a “college guy,” who has “a little book called How to Run a Railroad.”  In other words, McCloud is not a real man, like Murray.

Then some cowhands come riding up, telling Murray that Rostro, a sheepherder, has been grazing his sheep in the North Flats again.  Murray tells them to take the dogs and run the sheep into the river.  Marian points out that the North Flats is government land, and that Rostro has a right to graze his sheep there if he wants.  Murray tells her to keep out of it.  “The trouble with Marian,” he says to Smitty, “she’s been mixing in things that are none of her business, and I’m going to break her of it.”  Even in 1948, the audience would have regarded this as verbal abuse, even if they might not have used that term.  So we are beginning to see the dark side of Murray.

Another clue to his dark side is the conflict with the sheepherder.  Even if we didn’t know that Rostro was within his rights to graze his sheep in the North Flats, we would know that Rostro is a good man and Murray is a bad man, because that formula, sheepherder good, cattleman bad, is almost without exception in a Western.  (The exception would be Devil’s Doorway (1950).)

Also adding to our suspicions is the fact that Murray and Marian do not have a child.  Now, a bad man in a Western might have adult children, like Ike Clanton in a Wyatt Earp movie, but he won’t have a really young child like, well, Joe and Marian in Shane, to bring that movie up once more.

Furthermore, Smith becomes suspicious about Murray’s ranch, wondering how he could have acquired it on the pay he receives from the railroad.  He suspects that Murray has been in cahoots with a thief and cattle rustler named Rebstock (Donald Crisp), who has a hired gun named Whitey Du Sang.  All in all, it is clear that Murray is corrupt.

Anyway, once Murray gets to town, he turns in his report to McCloud, asking him if he wants it written in “violet ink,” implying, of course, that McCloud is effeminate.  Later on, when McCloud arrives at a wreck, Murray offers him some brandy, saying it will “make a man out of you.”  McCloud confronts Murray, telling him that the merchandise that is in his wagon is not damaged, and that it is actually loot, and that what Murray is doing is what he, McCloud, was sent to stop.  Smith backs him up.  Murray becomes angry and tells his men to unload the wagon by smashing the boxes and bags as they do so.  One man tosses some material at Sinclair, saying, “Here’s a dress for you.”

Sinclair fires Murray and his men, and Murray becomes so angry that he decides to go in with Rebstock all the way, purposely causing trains to wreck so they can steal the merchandise.  Eventually, a guard is killed.  From this point, the movie follows an unimaginative plot.  Du Sang kills Rebstock and steals his money.  Smith kills Du Sang.  And finally, Smith has to kill Murray.  It is left to our imagination that Smith and Marian, after a decent interval, will get married.

But let’s back up a minute.  When a posse is formed to go after Rebstock and his gang for holding up the train and killing the guard, McCloud tells Smith that he can ride and shoot, and that he would like to come along.  Smith agrees.  Once the shooting starts, however, McCloud ends up being killed.

It would have been an interesting variation in the standard formula if after Smith killed Du Sang, McCloud killed Murray.  But the people who produced this movie apparently agreed, perhaps without being fully aware of it, that Murray’s contempt for McCloud as bookish and effeminate was justified.  And so, what could have been a refreshing change of pace became routine fare, an unremarkable Western barely worth the effort of watching it.

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959-1963)

I was just becoming an adolescent when The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis started playing on television in 1959, and like the title character of that show, I had no interest in being at home with my parents watching television. Like Dobie, I wanted be with my friends, but mostly, I wanted to be with girls.  And so it was that the show that I might so easily have identified with, I never saw.

But in the age of Netflix, it is now possible to watch old television shows on DVDs in the order in which they originally aired, and being retired with lots of time on my hands, I have lately been taking advantage of that possibility.  I say I have lots of time on my hands not only because I no longer have to work, but also because the attractions of youth have largely dissipated.  While I do have friends, the need to hang out with them incessantly, the way I did when I was a teenager, no longer exists for the simple reason that I do not have the need to get out of the house and away from my parents the way I used to.  As for women, while I still find them desirable, I am no longer willing to put out the effort, in part owing to the decline of passion that comes with age, and in part owing to the wisdom that also comes of age.

I don’t wish to give the impression that watching old television shows is the bulk of my entertainment.  I watch recently produced movies and television shows too.  Many of them are quite good, fortunately, but many more try my patience.  Sometimes a show seems so determined to check all the boxes of ethnic and sexual diversity that the story is overwhelmed by these unrealistic combinations of characters.  It might be argued that America has become a more ethnically and sexually diverse country than it was in the 1960s, and that is true.  But while some of that diversity might actually show up in our family or close circle of friends, it seldom does so to the degree that it does on the screen, where the amount of diversity we see is a result forced by the felt need to get it all in.

One of the charms of an old movie or television show is that there was no need for this.  Everyone could be white and heterosexual without anyone thinking there was anything politically incorrect about it.  This is important not because being white and heterosexual is intrinsically better than the alternatives, but because it makes for simpler dramatic situations.  Whether diversity is a good thing in real life is a different question from whether it is a good thing in drama.  If The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis were made today, Dobie’s best friend would no longer be the not-too-bright beatnik Maynard Krebs, but an African American who is always ready with sage advice.  Zelda Gilroy, the one girl that Dobie could actually have but did not want, because she was neither pretty nor sexy, would be replaced by someone who is gay, trying to convince Dobie that since he is getting nowhere with girls, he should consider having a boyfriend instead. Both these substitutes would have overwhelmed the simple plots and precluded the light humor that makes watching this show a pleasure.  Instead, the tension between white and black, on the one hand, and between straight and gay, on the other, would have made this a very different show.  And that would be just for starters. Thalia Menninger would no longer be a scheming gold digger, but a girl intent on having a professional career. And room would also have to be made in Dobie’s life for a Latino, an Asian,and a Muslim.

Could it still have been funny?  Maybe.  And if a show makes us laugh, nothing else matters. But when I watch a modern situation comedy that does not make me laugh, and I find myself at the same time being acutely aware of all the obligatory diversity that has been crammed into it, I cannot help but wonder if the latter is the reason for the former.

On the Significance and Function of Holidays

So here we are on Martin Luther King’s Day.  We are all familiar with the struggle of Martin Luther King, Jr. for civil rights, and we are all familiar with the derivative struggle to make a federal holiday in honor of him.  The appropriate day for honoring King is his birthday, January 15, which is today, a Monday.

But that is a coincidence.  By law, the holiday occurs on the third Monday in January. Right away, that makes us suspicious. I mean, what is more important, honoring King by having a federal holiday occur on his birthday, whichever day that may be, or making sure federal employees get a three-day weekend so they can have a good time?

Let’s back up a little, about six thousand years ago, when God created the heavens and the earth in six days.  On the seventh day, he rested.  And if having a day off was good enough for God, he figured it would be good enough for the rest of us too. Well, no one had to be told twice to knock off work once a week, but God wanted the day to be in honor of his creation, not a day for people to enjoy themselves by playing games or loafing around.  So, one of his Ten Commandments is to remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.  That part about keeping it holy meant that the Sabbath had to be turned into the most boring day of the week, and so much so, that some people would actually sneak off and do a little work anyway, for which, if caught, they would be put to death.

This has been the tension in holidays ever since.  On the one hand, we are supposed to honor something or other, which presumably means having a somber expression, speaking in reverential tones, and passing the day in a mirthless manner. On the other hand, getting the day off is something we hate to waste, and so we soon forget the original purpose and use the day to have fun. For example, Good Friday and Easter, the days Christians are supposed to honor the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, their Lord and Savior, has become Spring Break, the week college students head to the beach for sun and surf, sex and suds.

And that is no doubt why in 1994, President Clinton signed a law designating Martin Luther King Day a National Day of Service.  I think the idea was that we would all use the day off to do some volunteer work.  Of course, that suggestion was directed primarily to government workers, because the rest of us typically go to work just as we do on any other Monday.  The fact that those in the private sector have to work while those in the public sector get the day off created an invidious distinction, engendering hostility and resentment.  The purpose of the National Day of Service, then, was so that those of us who had to go to work would not feel cheated, knowing that those government workers that did get the day off would be spending it doing volunteer work.

Of course, the one holiday that is unequivocally about having a good time is New Year’s Day.  We honor nothing on that day, but merely recover from partying the night before.  Exactly why people should get the day off merely to celebrate the passage of time is a mystery.  But at least we are not asked to feign honor and reverence.  And we are not asked to volunteer.  But most important of all, the rest of us get this day off too, and not just civil servants.

At the other extreme, there are Thanksgiving and Christmas. We know that these days are meant to be taken seriously, because they have yet to be moved to the nearest Monday.  Of course, some people manage to take off the Friday after Thanksgiving, turning that into a four-day weekend, and some people manage to combine Christmas and New Year’s Day into a whole week off, but all in all, the fact that these days are not invariably celebrated on a Monday tells us that they are meant for more than just having fun.  Besides, these are days many of us have to spend with relatives, so how much fun could we be having anyway?

The Fourth of July doesn’t count.  It cannot be put in the same category with Thanksgiving and Christmas, even though it is not celebrated on the nearest Monday. Rather, this holiday is tied to the actual day it is supposed to celebrate owing to the fact that its name designates that day.  It has this in common with New Year’s Day. Sometimes it is referred to as Independence Day, and if that ever takes hold, we will finally be able to move it to the nearest Monday, the ultimate destiny of every holiday.

It is interesting that Memorial Day has been moved to the nearest Monday, but Veterans Day has managed to remain fixed to November 11, even though both days have something to do with honoring people who served in the military. But more private sector employees get off for Memorial Day than for Veterans Day, probably because the former affords people a three-day weekend, whereas the latter does not.  In other words, Veterans Day has more honor and reverence, because it remains tied to a particular date, but Memorial Day is more important to us, on account of the long weekend we get.

Columbus Day is another one of those holidays in which only government employees get the day off.  This is in honor of the Europeans who killed off the Indians and took their land. There is a movement to change the name to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, in honor of the Native Americans who were killed by Europeans and had their land taken away from them.  There are two things about this day that will not change however it is designated:  it will be celebrated on a Monday, and only government employees will get the day off.

Finally, we come to the one holiday in which everything comes together without the usual tension between honor and reverence on the one hand, and having a good time on the other.  That is Labor Day.  This is all about honoring the worker. He gets to take the day off and honor himself.  This is the one lasting contribution of the labor movement.

Republicans still haven’t figured out how they let this one get past them.

On Whether a Dishwasher Is a Luxury or a Necessity

Last month, the dishwasher in my apartment conked out.  The maintenance man said that owing to the holidays, it would take about a week to order a new one and install it. And so, during the last week of December, I had to wash the dishes by hand, something I had not done in fifty years, back when I still lived with my parents while going to college.  What a chore!  I had completely forgotten what that was like.  First, I would fill one sink with hot water and liquid dishwashing detergent. Then, after soaking the dishes for a bit, I would scrub them, if necessary, rinse them, and then dry.  It all made me appreciate what a luxury a dishwasher is.  Right now, the dishwasher is churning away as I write this, and what a pleasant sound that is.

My next door neighbor saw the maintenance man removing the dishwasher from my apartment, and she called me to find out what was going on.  When I told her, she said she never used her dishwasher.  She lives alone, and she said she just washes the plate and utensils as soon as she is finished eating. A few days later, I brought the subject up while playing bridge, and the one man and two women at the table all pretty much said the same thing:  they never use their dishwasher, but simply wash everything by hand as soon as they finish eating. The man did allow that he used the dryer in the dishwasher rather than dry the dishes by hand, but that is all.  I don’t like to ask people personal questions, so I do not know this for sure, but I think they each live alone.

That, I suspect, is a critical feature.  I have never been married nor even lived with anyone, but I believe an arrangement in which each person would be responsible for washing his or her own dishes would be not work.  And then there would be the problem of the utensils used in common, such as the pots and pans.

Taking turns might be one solution, but there is the problem of asymmetrical personalities.  I knew a couple guys who were roommates while in college. They agreed each would do the dishes on alternate nights.  But one was neat, while the other was a slob.  On the first night, Mr. Neat did all the dishes, but on the second night, Mr. Slob just never quite got around to doing them, and so they were still in the sink the next morning. Mr. Neat decided he would teach Mr. Slob a lesson, so he let the dishes go unwashed the next night as well. Problem was, Mr. Slob didn’t care, if he even noticed at all.  The only one who was taught a lesson was Mr. Neat, and not long after that he moved out.

I found that story amusing enough when I heard it, but it is with a sense of dread that I broach the subject of married couples.  From what I gather, it usually one person who does the dishes, whether it is the wife (because it’s woman’s work) or the husband (because she cooked the meal, after all), but I suspect there is a lingering resentment about the arrangement however arrived at and by whatever justification.

I once knew a woman who said that when she was single and in hopes of getting married someday, if she went to a man’s apartment and the sink was full of dirty dishes, that pretty much ended the relationship right then, because, she said, she had no intention of cleaning up that mess on a regular basis. Of course, a man who would bring a woman to his apartment with a sink full of dirty dishes would also likely be messy in other ways, it being just an obvious indicator of a general situation.  After she had been married for a few years, presumably to a man with tidier habits, she started having an affair.  Her lover typically had dirty dishes in his sink, but she would walk right by that pile and go straight back to the bedroom.  “I knew I wouldn’t have to clean up after him,” she said, “so it didn’t bother me one bit.  As long as there weren’t any cracker crumbs in the bed, I didn’t care.”  (I knew a guy who did have cracker crumbs in the bed the night he brought a woman to his place, and he just got out the broom, stood on the bed, and swept it out.)

In any event, I suspect that much of the marital tension over doing the dishes is greatly alleviated by the presence of a dishwasher.  Though they were not married, I suspect Mr. Neat would have just put the dishes in the dishwasher and turned it on, if they had had a dishwasher.  But when the dishes have to be done by hand, that is when the trouble begins.  A friend of mine said that one night after dinner, his wife started doing the dishes by hand, for they had no dishwasher, while he sat on the couch and started playing his guitar.  After a few minutes, his wife, who worked same as he did, and who had been the one to cook the dinner they just ate, said, “If you loved me, you would offer to do the dishes.” He stopped playing the guitar, thought for a moment, and said, “Then I guess I don’t love you.” That was not the only reason she eventually left him, but I am pretty sure it made a major contribution to their estrangement.

After she left, the dishes piled up in the sink.  For a few months, he would take the top dish off the pile along with some silverware he could dig out, wash them, use them to eat his meal, and then put them back on top of the pile again. Finally, the absurdity of the situation became too much.  So, he set aside one dish, one glass, one fork, spoon, and knife, and threw the rest away.  His wife said that when she heard about that, she felt as though he had thrown her away. All hope of a reconciliation was dashed.

But suppose they had had a dishwasher.  Their marriage might have been saved. She would never have felt the need to challenge her husband’s love for her, because the dishwasher would already have been doing its job before any ill feeling could accumulate.  And had she left him anyway, for whatever reason, he would never have needed to throw the dishes away, and they might have patched things up.

I doubt if I would have reached the point of throwing most of my dishes and silverware away if I did not have a dishwasher, but after a week of doing them by hand, I suspect the temptation to let them pile up in the sink would ultimately have prevailed.  And that brings me back to these people I know that live alone and do not even bother to use the dishwasher, who were as surprised to find out that I did use one as I was to find out that they did not.

And so it seems that if you live alone, a dishwasher is a luxury that you may or may not care about, depending on the kind of person you are.  But if you are married, I believe it is a necessity.  So, just in case you were looking for a little marital advice from a bachelor, there it is.

Truth, Reality, and Ideology

Although we expect all politicians to dissemble, equivocate, and lie, the disconnect between the Trump presidency and the truth has taken all this to a level most of us have never before experienced.  By “the Trump presidency,” I include not only President Trump and his administration, but also the support Trump receives from Fox News and certain members of Congress, not to mention Trump’s base. What most of us would call undeniable facts, they deny with equanimity or with passion, depending on the temperament of the one who denies them.

What exactly, we wonder, is their connection with the reality? Do they truly believe what they say?  Or are they, with full consciousness, telling bald-faced lies? Are playing word games, intent on deceiving us while staying right with God?  Or are they confused, unable to bring the facts into some kind of connection with their thoughts?

It was with these unanswered questions in the back of my mind that I sat down to read Robert Warshow’s The Immediate Experience, because Warshow was an influential film critic, while I am a movie lover.  In other words, I was just planning on gaining a few insights regarding movies I had watched, and thus it was with a bit of serendipity that I came across his 1953 essay, “The ‘Idealism’ of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” written shortly after the Rosenbergs were convicted of spying and sentenced to death. While in prison, they wrote letters to each other, which were published.  Warshow’s essay is a discussion of those letters. What struck me was the resonance between his analysis of the Rosenbergs’ idealism and the present situation concerning the Trump presidency, made all the more striking by the fact that they are at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Warshow says that “the commitment for which they died—and by which, we must assume, they somehow fulfilled themselves—was precisely that the truth was not to be spoken.”  Because the Rosenbergs knew their letters to each other would first be read by prison officials, and because they were hoping to avoid execution, Warshow admits that they cannot be expected to have been completely honest about their spying for the Soviets.  But their dissociation with the truth goes beyond mere prudence:

Under the circumstances, they could not have been truthful.  But there is something uncanny nevertheless in the way this husband and wife felt compelled to write to each other, never evading the issue but, on the contrary, coming back to it continually in order to repeat continually what was not true.

Warshow quotes excerpts in which the Rosenbergs speak of their innocence, of how they had been framed, putting the word “Communist” always in quotes, and denying that they had committed the crime they had been convicted of.  Of this, Warshow says:

No doubt there is a certain covert truth-telling in all this, with “we are innocent” standing for “my resolve is unshaken; I will not confess.” But one is forced to wonder whether the literal truth had not in some way ceased to exist for these people.  It is now about seventeen years since Communists told the truth about themselves … and enough time has passed for the symbolic language of Communism to have taken on an independent existence.

The suggestion here seems to be that while a single thought cannot survive if it contradicts reality, when numerous thoughts are brought together under an ideology, they begin interacting with one another rather than with experience, which they are able to ignore.  And the internal logic of the ideology alters the meanings of words in such a manner that denying facts can act as a substitute for denying the ideas held by others.  For example, as Warshow notes:

… when he [Julius] says “it is obvious that I could never commit the crime I stand convicted of,” we cannot assume that he is simply lying.  More probably, what he means is something like this:  If it were a crime, I could not have done it.  Since in the language of the unenlightened what I did is called a crime, and I am forced to speak in that language, the only truthful thing to say is that I did not do it.

Not only did their ideology detach itself from external experience of the world, but also, according to Warshow, from experience of themselves as persons:

It is as if these two had no internal sense of their own being but could see themselves only from the outside, in whatever postures their “case” seemed to demand—as if, one might say, they were only the most devoted of their thousands of “sympathizers.”

And later Warshow concludes that “they filled their lives with the second-hand, never so much as suspecting that anything else was possible.”  And as such, they could relate to anything that served their purpose, and just as easily disown it later, “the initial responses and their contradictories [being] equally real, and equally unreal.”

There is something to this more profound than insincerity…. The Communist is always celebrating the same thing:  the great empty Idea which has taken on the outlines of his personality….

What they [the Rosenbergs] stood for was not Communism as a certain form of social organization, not progress as a belief in the possibility of human improvement, but only their own identity as Communists or “progressives,” and they were perfectly “sincere” in making use of whatever catchwords seemed at any moment to assert that identity—just as one who seeks to establish his identity as a person of culture might try to do so either by praising abstract painting or by damning it.  The Rosenbergs thought and felt whatever their political commitment required them to think and feel. But if they had not had the political commitment could they have thought and felt at all?

The thrust of all this seems to be that the most important aspect of their ideology was their personal identification with it.  We normally think of an ideology as directed toward some end, toward a better world in some sense. But once an ideology has triumphed over experience, the better world can be asserted and believed in regardless of the facts.  Jesus once asked how it would profit a man if he gained the whole world but lost his soul.  In this case, we may ask how it will profit a man if he loses both the world and his soul for the sake of an ideology.

I believe it would be both tedious and unnecessary for me to list examples from the Trump administration, Congress, and Fox News as corresponding instances of Warshow’s analysis of the Rosenbergs, so I will leave all that to the reader’s imagination.  And as to whether his analysis captures the nature of the Trump presidency and its relationship with the truth, I will leave that to the reader’s judgment.  But I have saved for last my favorite tidbit from Warshow’s essay, which I will present without additional comment:

On July 4, 1951, Julius clipped a copy of the Declaration of Independence from the New York Times and taped it to the wall of his cell.  “It is interesting,” he writes to Ethel, “to read these words concerning free speech, freedom of the press and religion in this setting.  These rights our country’s patriots died for can’t be taken from the people even by Congress or the courts.”  Does it matter that the Declaration of Independence says nothing about free speech, freedom of the press, or freedom of religion, and that Julius therefore could not have found it “interesting” to read “these words” in that particular document?  It does not matter. Julius knew that the Declaration of Independence “stands for” America. Since, therefore, he already “knew” the Declaration, there was no need for him to actually read it in order to find it “interesting,” and it could not have occurred to him that he was being untruthful in implying that he had just been reading it when he had not.  He could “see himself” reading it, so to speak, and this dramatic image became reality: he did not know that he had not read it.